The Thorney Liber vitae (hereafter ThLV) is one of only three libri vitae surviving from medieval England. Although this important text has been much worked and commented upon, this is the first time a full edition has appeared in print.

The genesis of the present volume is complex. When he died in 1976, Olof von Feilitzen left a near completed onomasticon of the personal names in ThLV. His literary executors passed his manuscript to Cecily Clark, who undertook to complete and publish it. But although she worked extensively on ThLV, publishing several important papers, at the time of her premature death in 1992 neither her edition, on which she worked with Neil Ker, nor von Feilitzen's onomasticon had appeared in print. Cecily Clark's papers, including those of von Feilitzen, passed after her death to John Insley, who in his turn undertook, with the permission and support of von Feilitzen's family, to publish the onomasticon, but progress was slow.

The publication of The Durham Liber Vitae (hereafter DLV) in 2007, to which John Insley was a major contributor, provided both a spur for the revival of the Thorney project and a model for how it might be done. The three Durham volumes consist of a full edition of the text, together with historical, linguistic and prosopographical commentaries and specialist introductory essays on various aspects of the text. It was clear to both John Insley and Lynda Rollason from the outset that both Cecily Clark's edition of the text and Olof von Feilitzen's onomasticon of the personal names should be incorporated in the proposed Thorney volume, but that Cecily Clark's other unpublished work on Thorney, including draft linguistic commentaries, were too incomplete to be of use. It was also clear that new research would have to be commissioned to complete the Thorney volume on the model of the DLV, and Richard Gameson and Katharine Keats-Rohan both agreed to join the team to see the revived project to completion.

At the core of the present volume is Cecily Clark's edition of the text with Neil Ker's divisions into stints, both checked and revised by Richard Gameson and Lynda Rollason.